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Firing from the lip: Sarah Palin took the fight directly to the Democrats in a weekend speech. Photo: AP

Mitt Romney’s twin wins over the weekend in the Maine caucuses and the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual straw poll leave the GOP presidential-nomination race right where it’s been all along — in trouble and waiting for a Prince Charming.

In Maine, Romney won with 39.2 percent of the vote, less than four points ahead of Ron Paul. The principal “not-Romneys” — Paul and Rick Santorum — took 53 percent of the roughly 5,600 nonbinding votes cast, about 2 percent of the state’s Republican electorate.

Romney’s numbers were similar in the CPAC poll, in which he grabbed 38 percent of the 3,408 votes by characterizing himself as a “severely conservative” governor of Massachusetts during his one term. Santorum finished second with 31 percent, followed by a fading Newt Gingrich with 15 percent and Paul with 12 percent.

A win is a win, but even by Romney standards, these victories were deeply unimpressive. Romney got all of 2,190 votes in Maine this year.

At CPAC, Romney flooded the zone with supporters as he touted his newfound conservative credentials, but it was Santorum’s speech that got to the heart of the matter: “Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of the party who the party’s not excited about?”

Precisely. As it did in his triple losses to Santorum last week in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado, Romney’s enthusiasm gap is showing. He simply can’t get voters to muster any passion for his candidacy — in part because the only rationale he’s offered is that he’s a cold-blooded businessman and that President Obama is “in over his head.”

Not that Obama has damaged the economy, weakened the US abroad, rewarded his green-energy cronies with lavish government subsidies and assaulted the First Amendment with the recent ObamaCare birth-control edict. No wonder Romney can’t rouse any passion.

That’s an ominous sign should he be the nominee, because Romney will need all the fired-up voters he can get to overcome the president’s big-city voter-turnout machines and media enablers and protectors.

Yet, the huge Tea Party wave that routed the Democrats in 2010 has so far been quiescent, shifting its support among the various not-Romney candidates — Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Gingrich and now Santorum — but not settling on one so far.

That may be changing. For the first time, Santorum leads Romney 38 percent to 23 percent in one national poll, as well in the upcoming Michigan primary in Romney’s native state, which votes along with Arizona on Feb. 28.

A loss in Michigan would remove any tattered claims of “inevitability” and “electability” and send the nominating contest into uncharted waters — perhaps even to a brokered convention in August.

The fire Romney is missing was on display at CPAC in the lightning-rod persona of Sarah Palin, who led the crowd in shouting down some Occupy infiltrators who tried to disrupt her speech. She and the rest of the audience crushed them by chanting “USA! USA!” until they were removed.

“You just won,” Palin told the convention. “See how easy that was?”

Her speech itself was nonstop red meat.

“We aren’t red Americans, we aren’t blue Americans,” she said, “We are red, white and blue Americans and, President Obama, we are through with you!” She flayed the Obama Democrats for the “capitalism of connections” — a line of attack not open to Romney, who’s still defending his stint at Bain Capital — and exhorted voters to “drain the Jacuzzi and throw out the bums with the bathwater.”

That’s the sort of spunk that movement conservatives want and need to see and hear — and more than just from Palin, who’s now more a celebrity than a politician. Someone needs to pick up her combative mantle and take the fight directly to Obama and the Democrats.

That’s the real path to the nomination — not the Romney strategy of divide, conquer and annihilate with his super PAC ads.

Will Romney shift gears and step up his pace? Can Santorum do it? Or will the party turn to someone else in August (Paul Ryan? Chris Christie?) who can?